The Digital Archives project unveiled on March 3 a website featuring the diaries of Yankai Tan, the first chairman of the Nanjing National Government. The 2.5 million-word diaries, from the collections of the Scripta Sinica Database of Academia Sinica, constitute a precious historical record of a political figure who defined the early days of the Republic of China. A ceremony to unveil the website was held in the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica at 10 am on March 3, 2011.

        Yankai Tan (1880-1930) was identified as a genius by the Qing emperor's tutor at the age of 11, and was the highest scoring candidate of the highest imperial examination in the final days of the Qing Dynasty. In the early days of the Republic of China, he became a politician of the revolutionary faction and was renowned for his diplomacy. The diaries of Tan, who was a well-known calligrapher and gourmet in addition to being a politician, span a 35-year period between 1895 to 1930 and document the daily life of people at that time, as well as Tan's personal reflections.  

        The website, named "Writing from Tan's heart—The Website of Yankai's Diaries", was created by the Digital Content and Technology Center team from the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation led by Academician Yung-Fa Chen, Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Modern History. To engage younger viewers, Academician Chen and his team integrated precious historical content and cutting-edge information technology, and spent many hours digitalizing Tan's handwriting to create the website. The website using situations found in contemporary daily lives, draws users  back to Tan's time to experience how the Chinese intelligentsia lived through the turbulent time during the end of the Qing Dynasty and the early days of the ROC.

        Dr. Chen said: "Most people nowadays are not familiar with the history of the ROC and perhaps they don't even want to know about it. We hope we can display Academia Sinica's digital resources to the public and young learners."

        The website divides sections from the diaries into seven topics: "Daily Happenings of Tan's Life", "Featured Events", "Anecdotes of the Famous", "Diary Magnifying Glass", "Modern Gourmets Talk about Tan cuisine", "Shanghai Life" and "Diary Exchange."  

        The "Anecdotes of the Famous" section introduces stories about important political figures during the period of the Xinhai Revolution including historical photos from both Academia Historica and the Kuomintang (KMT) Party Archives.

        The "Modern Gourmets Talk about Tan Cuisine" section features some popular delicacies mentioned by Tan, such as "Wei-gong" tofu and "Zu-an" shark's fin. The unit includes comments on Tan's favorite dishes by well-known contemporary food critics.

        The "Diary Magnifying Glass" section uses the "Chinese word identification technique of Academia Sinica" developed by the Digital Archives technical team to find the names and places mentioned frequently in the diaries and allow viewers to interactively seek out the relationships between important people and events. The calligraphy in Tan's diaries is included.

        The "Diary Exchange" section uses the "Chinese Character component searching system", developed by Academia Sinica to allow viewers to pick their favorite diary format, writing style (oracle bone inscription, bronze inscription, Chu-writing, small seal script or face regular script) and content to make their own ancient diary. The users can even send their personal e-diaries to friends.

        Other digital archives compiled by Academia Sinica include a large collection of Taiwan's fish, shells and plants; aboriginal artifacts of Taiwan; historical maps and remote sensing images of modern China; diplomatic and economic records; Chinese historical artifacts (Chinese and Taiwanese archeological materials, engraved stones, stone and bronze rubbings, bamboo scripts, rare books, ethnological findings in southwest China, and the lexicon of Ming-Qing Archives); and Mandarin and Formosa language archives.

        Related websites:
Writing from Tan's heart—the website of Yankai's diaries: http://digiarch.sinica.edu.tw/tan
Academia Sinica Digital Resources: http://digiarch.sinica.edu.tw